During the playing of the game of tennis, or during tennis coaching activities, it is common for many tennis balls to be left on the ground. Picking up such balls by hand can necessitate repeatedly bending down to pick up the balls, in order to place them in a bag, basket, or other container for reuse later on. This is labour intensive and inconvenient, and can place strain on the back of a person picking up balls in this manner.
Known ball retrieval devices make use of metal baskets with lower bars with spaces between the bars. Such a basket is forced onto a tennis ball, so that the ball is squeezed between the bars before popping through the bars into the basket. This involves compression of the ball and necessitates deformation of the bars. After repeated use, this can result in damage to the ball and, depending on the type of basket, even wearing and breakage of the basket. In addition, the need to apply force to urge the ball into the basket is inconvenient.
Another disadvantage of such known baskets is the space taken up by them, as this limits the number of baskets that can be transported from one location to another. For example, in a case where there are two baskets present, but all of the balls available can be stowed in one of the baskets while the other basket remains empty, the full volume of space required to accommodate both baskets is needed even though one of the baskets is unused.
It is an object of the present invention to overcome or ameliorate one or more disadvantage of the prior art or to provide a useful alternative thereto.